Jonathan Krause
(2019)

Each bomb-planting team had been given potions of invisibility to mask their covert activity.

On the night of 2/3 February 1916 Nguyen Anh Hue, sometimes referred to a Professor Hue and the soothsayer of Saigon arrived at the house of a man called Truong Van No, in the village of Cua Lap.He brought with him plans for an insurrection stretching from Cambodia to Cochin china (southern Indo-china), to be launched in less than two weeks.

Smaller scale rebels, like the pirate king De Tham, had largely been mopped up by 1914. Thus, Indochina entered the First World War relatively stable and secure, from a French perspective. The conditions of the war would change this, however, by introducing new pressures to Indochinese societies and exacerbating long-standing grievances. Indochina would suffer a series of rebellions from 1916 to 1918.

A group of 15 prisoners supposedly led by Le Van Sot, a prisoner with a record of rebellion and insubordination, managed to catch a guard unawares and jump him. Damprun ran out of his administrative residence to the sight of this Indochinese guard laying on the ground and being beaten.

We are obliged to believe that, frightened by the terrible effects of French bullets which had dropped several of them despite the virtue of their talismans [of invulnerability],they no longer dared to commit to a renewed attack [on the prison], and instead escaped rapidly to Cholon, where they hoped to and a safe haven and perhaps some reinforcements.

Smaller-scale versions of this sort of unrest were shockingly commonplace across Cochin china in January and February 1916. Large gangs of armed and often tattooed men, deserters, fugitives, revolutionaries, religious zealots and simple bandits roamed the country-side pillaging, ransoming, and generally harassing the populace

Whereas many of the key players in the 1913 plot had managed to win acquittal through the courts of appeal sentences handed down in the courts martial were not so easily undone. 17 men were sentenced to death for their part in the attack at Ba Ria (8 of them in absentia); 38 were condemned to die for their part in the attack on Saigon Central Prison on 22 February, just one week after the attack. The sentences were carried out the next day in accordance with the decree of 10 October 1914 declaring a state of siege in Indochina.

Jonathan Krause (2019): Rebellion and Resistance in FrenchIndochina in the First World War, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

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